Bills win in T.O

TORONTO In the four years the Buffalo Bills have made their annual visits to Toronto, the only thing that has really changed is the most important one.

The Bills are actually worth watching.

The tickets for the Bills Toronto Series are still overpriced; their bitter stateside fan base still confuses the Peace Bridge with the Berlin Wall; Rogers still represents a major threat to the CFL; the NFL playing surface is still too small for a stadium that is all-purpose for every purpose but football; and the antiseptic carnival outside Rogers Centre bears no resemblance to an American tailgate.

But, suddenly, here are the Bills at 5-and-2 tied with New England for the division lead and threatening to make the NFL playoffs for the first time since the Music City Miracle of 1999.

Win No. 5 was a shockingly thorough 23-0 victory over the slumping Washington Redskins, another nifty surprise through the season’s opening month. But, while the ’Skins have now dropped three in a row, the Bills are keeping pace with the AFC’s leading teams.

As usual, the win was anchored by the two linchpins of their offence, a pair who’ve been dumped upon from such great heights during their unlikely careers that their recent successes are reaching folklore status.

Quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, the only Harvard pivot to ever start in the NFL and a guy the Sporting News once named as the fifth-smartest man in all of sport, was in complete command of his team and of his sense of timing. He completed 21 of 27 passes for an effective 262 yards and two touchdowns.

And running back Fred Jackson, whose middle name should be “Initials” after career-stalling stops in the UFL, NIFL and NFL Europe, carried the ball a whopping 26 times for 120 yards and caught three passes for another 74 yards. When Jackson got his first NFL start against these same Redskins in 2007, he became the first Division III running back to start in seven years. It was Jackson’s fifth game already this season with 100-plus yards, and third in a row, the first time that’s happened for Buffalo since Thurman Thomas 17 years ago.

But there was a surprising amendment to the Bills’ standard 2011 equation. A defence that has been accused of not being able to stop the run, not being able to stop the pass and not being able to find anything else to defend against, came up huge against a ’Skins offence that is not great, but not horrible either.

Buffalo’s defence went from sad to rad. Ranked dead last in the league with only four sacks coming into the game, the Bills unloaded for a punishing nine on John Beck, who took over the Washington attack from Rex Grossman last week. They made four interceptions and the special-teams unit came up with a critical blocked field goal, marking the first time in 15 years the Bills have blocked field goals in back-to-back games.

It was the first Bills win in their four regular-season games played here, although they did win the two exhibition games.

A 20-yard touchdown reception by tight end Scott Chandler and two Rian Lindell field goals, one on the final play of the half, gave the Bills a 13-0 lead into the intermission. Chandler scored on a 15-yard toss in the third quarter and Lidell hit from 41 yards in the fourth to stretch the margin to the final 23 points.

The attendance was 51,579, about the same as the previous three regular-season games here, but with a couple of important differences. This time, pretty well all of the ticket holders actually came through the gates and, secondly, the Bills were truly a home team, the fan favourites by a large margin. Winning changes everything.

And, Sunday aside, the Bills are winning mostly because they have a well-oiled offence, the result of having patience with Fitzpatrick and, it says here, the work of offensive line coach Joe D’Alessandris, whose unit is opening holes for Jackson and closing them for Fitzpatrick.

You could also look toward a couple of the Bills longtime CFL connections for some of the radical improvements this year. George Cortez, who coached 18 years in the CFL before arriving in Buffalo this year, is rubbing Fitzpatrick with the same magic dust he applied to Dave Dickenson and Jeff Garcia in Calgary.

And, in his second Buffalo stint five years ago, ex-Alouette coach Marv Levy went out and got Jackson. Why? Because Levy’s alma mater was tiny Coe College, where Jackson toiled brilliantly in anonymity.

The other school Levy attended, by the way, was Harvard, where Fitzpatrick did so much, with so little attention.